I read two conversations going on here, one individual and one theoretical. I think I understand the first pretty well: it's about the experience of being particular persons, facing what we call around here "contemporary society." The theoretical conversation I understand less well. Mostly, I think, because we haven't brought anything into it yet beyond personal experience. What forms of learning should we add?

• Many people have asked what justice is, philosophically. From Plato and Aristotle to Hobbes, Locke, Kant and Hegel, to Rawls, Nozick, Baier, Sandel, Walzer and Okin, just to pick a few from one good reader.
• We can ask about justice as a political institutions problem, or as an outcome of the "disputing process".
• We can think about justice-making as a community activity, from sociological and anthropological perspectives.

Each of these points of view once mastered and added to our various different understandings would help us to define, by consilience, a deeper, multi-origined answer to the theoretical question being asked.

Or, just to be localist about it, we could ask what the readings we have from Holmes and Cohen do to help us approach the question from their points of view, using their methods of social description and analysis. And even, what has Robinson, merely a character in a prose poem, got to offer us on the subject?